The Fight by Norman Mailer Page B

where they hide the white man until the trouble starts.” He winked, as if this remark need have no more validity than the previous one.
    “Are you going to try to hit Foreman’s cut?” asked another Black reporter.
    “I’m going to hit
around
the cut,” answered Ali. “I’m going to beat him good,” he said out of the bottomless funds of his indignation, “and I want the credit for winning. I don’t want to give it to the cut.” He made a point of saying, “After I win, they talk about me fighting for ten million dollars.”
    “If they do, will you still retire?”
    “I don’t know. I’m going home with no more than one million, three hundred thousand. Half of the five milliongoes to the Government, then half a million for expenses and one-third to my manager. I’m left with one million three. That ain’t no money. You give me a hundred million today, I’ll be broke tomorrow. We got a hospital we’re working on, a Black hospital being built in Chicago, costs fifty million dollars. My money goes into causes. If I win this fight, I’ll be traveling everywhere.” Now the separate conversations had come together into one and he talked with the same muscular love of rhetoric that a politician has when he is giving his campaign speech and knows it is a good one. So Ali was at last in full oration. “If I win,” said Ali, “I’m going to be the Black Kissinger. It’s full of glory, but it’s tiresome. Every time I visit a place, I got to go by the schools, by the old folks’ home. I’m not just a fighter, I’m a world figure to these people” — it was as if he had to keep saying it the way Foreman had to hit a heavy bag, as if the sinews of his will would steel by the force of this oral conditioning. The question was forever growing. Was he still a kid from Louisville talking, talking, through the afternoon, and for all anyone knew through the night, talking through the ungovernable anxiety of a youth seized by history to enter the dynamos of history? Or was he in full process of becoming that most unique phenomenon, a twentieth century prophet, and so the anger and the fear of his voice was that he could not teach, could not convince, could not convince? Had any of the reporters made a face when he spoke of himself as the Black Kissinger? Now, as if to forestall derision, he clowned. “When you visit all these folks in all these strange lands, you got to eat. That’s not so easy. In America they offer you a drink. A fighter can turn down a drink. Here, you got to eat. They’rehurt if you don’t eat. It’s an honor to be loved by so many people, but it’s hell, man.”
    He could not, however, stay away from his mission. “Nobody is ready to know what I’m up to,” he said. “People in America just find it hard to take a fighter seriously. They don’t know that I’m using boxing for the sake of getting over certain points you couldn’t get over without it. Being a fighter enables me to attain certain ends. I’m not doing this,” he muttered at last, “for the glory of fighting, but to change a lot of things.”
    It was clear what he was saying. One had only to open to the possibility that Ali had a large mind rather than a repetitive mind and was ready for oncoming chaos, ready for the volcanic disruptions that would boil through the world in these approaching years of pollution, malfunction and economic disaster. Who knew what camps the world would yet see? Here was this tall pale Negro from Louisville, born to be some modern species of flunky to some bourbon-minted redolent white voice, and instead was living with a vision of himself as a world leader, president not of America, or even of a United Africa, but leader of half the Western world, leader doubtless of future Black and Arab republics. Had Muhammad Mobutu Napoleon Ali come for an instant face to face with the differences between Islam and Bantu?
    On the shock of this recognition, that Ali’s seriousness might as well be